Spin and Rotate the
Virtual Globe

(to spin globe,
hold mouse-button down and drag mouse up or down across globe)

(c) PALEOMAP Project, 2003

(Read the explanation below, while you wait for the
animation to load.)

You can interactively
manipulate and rotate this paleo-globe, and view the Earth from the
North Pole to the South Pole, and from the eastern edge of Asia to the western
edge of North America. To interactively grab and
rotate the globe, hold down mouse-button and drag mouse up and down across the
globe.

This globe shows the
supercontinent, Pangea, just before it began to break apart. At this time sea level
was about the same as today and the land areas were mostly emergent. The
modern political boundaries have been plotted on Pangea so that you can identify
the continents. Notice how tightly North America, Africa, and South
America fit together. Though more difficult to make out, you should also
be able to see the outlines of India, Madagascar, Australia and Antarctica -
without ice.

The colors represent the
depth of the ocean (dark blue - deep oceans, light blue - very shallow seas).
The color of the land areas represents elevation (green - lowlands, browns -
highlands, and white - high mountains). The large dark blue areas adjacent
to some of the continents represents ocean floor that has been subducted.
The width of these areas illustrates how fast subduction is recycling material
back into the Earth. This 3D topographic and bathymetric
model is based primarily on the digital elevation information from Smith and Sandwell
(1997), with additional digital elevation information for the Arctic Ocean
from Jakobsson et al. (2000), for Greenland without ice from Bamber et al. (2000), and
for Antarctica without ice from the British Antarctic
Survey (BEDMAP).

Some
interesting places to check out: the wide Tethys ocean separating
the northern and southern continents, the exotic terranes (Wrangellia and
Stikine) off
the west coast of North America that will collide to form the Canadian Rockies,
the location of Italy and Greece adjacent to the northern margin of
Africa. There was no ice cap at the
poles.

A screen-sized version of
this VR Globe is available on CD-ROM in both Quicktime and html (Java applet)
format. For more information see Teaching
Materials.

Images and animations of PALEOMAP
Paleoglobes can be licensed for use in textbooks,
museum exhibits, and educational CD-ROMs.

This page uses a java applet that displays a VR model. Visit FreedomVR
at www.honeylocust.com/vr/ for more
information about this applet.